Monthly Archives: December 2012

Random year end quotes. “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.” Yogi Berra “Every snowflake pleads innocent but it is still a an avalanche.” Stanislaw Lec (paraphrased) “Beware of false knowledge: it is more dangerous…

The following were featured articles in American Thinker in 2012. For a complete list of my featured articles go here. A Tax Increase Primer, 11/29/12 An effective tax system should be simple and not subject to change every time an…

Greg Gutfeld comments on the Sandra Fluke mini controversy in his new book, The Joy of Hate: “Forget that health insurance should really only pertain to serious stuff. This sad and stupid debate should be pretty simple: it’s between those who embrace…

In The National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson writes The Anecdotal President, 12/26/12. Excerpt: Obama’s current trajectory is not sustainable, and yet the president has not proposed spending cuts that would reduce the annual deficits in any meaningful way. Like…

Adding complexity and uncertainty to a system that is already too complex almost ensures another failure. Legislators think incompetence in the private sector can be cured with incompetence in the public sector. In the private sector mistakes are recognized…

When poverty becomes a government concern it spawns bureaucracies with six figure staffers who claim the moral high ground not by reducing poverty, but by perpetuating and institutionalizing it. Without the established moral virtues of freedom, tolerance, individual rights, and…

Nassim Taleb conceptualizes systems by their fragility in Antifragile:Things that Gain from Disorder. Fragile systems are weakened by stress, robust systems withstand and survive stress, and anti-fragile systems are actually strengthened by stress. (Think weightlifting and body building.) In his…

“This means that many of these families have no one working and earning a salary at all. (It’s hard to have a very impressive income if you don’t work.) By contrast, the average high income family has on average two…

Stanley Greenfield writes in Sultan Knish, The Perfect Prison excerpts: Bloomberg is a living model of the glass half-full theory of human behavior. This is after all a man who banned large sodas, and if you can’t trust people to…

The tragedy of Newtown was somehow more upsetting than other acts of deranged slaughter we have experienced. I could not turn on the news or read the social networks for days. I just did not want to either here the…

The most obvious rule of social science is that people will abuse any free good. Regardless of what politicians promise to gullible voters, government services cannot ultimately escape the constraints of supply and demand. A price of “free” evokes unbounded…

John Poderhetz writes in Commentary Magazine, The Way Forward, 12/12 excerpts You cannot beat something with nothing. Obama had a record that was less than nothing but a machine and an approach to victory that were more than enough to…

The worst school massacre was not Newtown. Tragic though it was, the worst by far was in Beslan and 386 were killed by Chechen Rebels when the Russians attacked. The worst school massacre in the United States was in 1927…

Banks do not survive by loaning money to prevent insolvency; they loan money to provide liquidity. Banks are not loaning money, not because of the lack of liquidity but because there is a lack of prudent loans to make. Small…

Charles Cooke writes When Words lose their Meaning in National Review Online, 12/13/12: Excerpts: The two key taxonomical terms that we use in American political life are largely meaningless. Whether it is a case of thought corrupting language or language…

Under capitalism, economic power flows not to the intellectual, who manipulates ideas and basks in their light, but to the man who gives himself to his ideas and tests them with his own wealth and work. It is these capitalists,…

Mark Steyn writes The Doctor Won’t See You Now in The National Review, 12/14/12. Excerpts: So good luck retaining any meaningful doctor-patient confidentiality in a system in which more people — insurers, employers, government commissars, TSA Obergropinführers, federal incentive-program auditors…

The Truth About Income Inequality from Center of the American Experiment By John H. Hinderaker Scott W. Johnson, December 1, 1995 excerpt Data generated by the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve and other nonpartisan sources…

Justin Hohn writes in American Thinker How Much Taxation Would Fund Current Spending?, 12/12/12 Excerpts: Using 2009 data, the IRS says that 8,274 tax returns were filed with incomes over $10 million. The total amount of income on those returns was $240.1 billion.…

The more surprising post election statistic is the strong Democratic support from the Asian American community, almost as strong as Hispanic support. Asian Americans are among the most successful immigrants and one may have believed that their value of core…